Q. I’d like to find out if xyz package is available or not using apt-get command. How do I look up package names and contents via shell command?

A. You need to use apt-cache command to performs a variety of operations on APTâ€™s package cache. apt-cache does not manipulate the state of the system but does provide operations to search and generate interesting output from the package metadata.

apt-cache search {package} command

search option performs a full text search on all available package lists for the regex pattern given. It searches the package names and the descriptions for an occurrence of the regular expression and prints out the package name and the short description. For example search for lighttpd package, enter:$ apt-cache search lighttpd Output: